Students as Creators & Personalized Learning

Trends Aside, Libraries Support Student Content Creation Now. The evolution of students from consumers to creators of content continues as a major trend in education, according to the 2015 Horizon Report K-12 Edition.

New technology is at the heart of this transition, and libraries are helping lead the way. The annual report, released June 29 by the nonprofit New Media Consortium, examines the trends and technologies that will shape primary and secondary education over the next five years. It references libraries as being at the forefront of maker spaces, which are among 18 major trends that include the rise of STEAM education: the intersection and importance of science, technology, arts, engineering, and math. The Horizon Report broke down challenges to school technology adoption into three categories: “solvable,” “difficult,” and “wicked,” representing a range of difficulty to implement over the next five years. The “solvable” problems reflect what many libraries are already doing, like focusing more on blended learning and STEAM.

Visual Storytelling: 5 Classroom Projects and Lesson Ideas That Combine Art and Writing. Here are five project ideas to inspire students to use both writing and art to create a work that is powerful and new. 1.

The Portrait Photo EssayA photo essay is a wonderful way to educate and engage the public. Whereas one photo can catch a viewer's interest, multiple photos can tell an in-depth story. Creating a portrait photo essay is a combination of art and journalism. You begin with planning. 2. 3. 4. 5.
27 Ways to Inspire Students to Innovate. Student-run genius bar: The facilitator’s guide.

A few of our favorite PBL resources. Steal these ideas from Project ReimaginED!
Energy and Engineering Unit for Students and Educators - Backyard Engineers. Siege! A game-based learning unit for NGSS standards SmartBlogs. SmartBlog on Education is shining a light on education technology innovations during May, exploring the latest products and tools and the hottest trends in ed-tech.

The benefits of game-based learning are becoming more widely appreciated and utilized by educators. Well-designed and skillfully implemented learning games provide students with fun, memorable and positive experiences in the classroom. Playful learning through digital games can increase student motivation to learn and engage with academic content and skills. High-quality games create opportunities for authentic strategic thinking, problem-solving and meaningful collaboration. They deliver pacing that is tailored to student needs with instantaneous feedback, create safe places to fail and allow rapid iterations for learning through simulations that might be too resource-consuming or dangerous if executed in the real world.

To begin the unit, each student completed a Google Forms content pretest. Michele L.
Colorado hybrid school taps into personalized learning. Achievement increasing by up to 240 percent in math and reading At Poudre School District Global Academy (PGA), a hybrid school in Fort Collins, Colo., students attend blended classes on campus and take online courses from home, and district educators say a personalized learning solution has had a positive impact in a number of academic areas.

Scores for grades 2-8 in math and reading on year-to-year Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessments show 140 to 240 percent growth, with the highest scores in grades 6-8—when students typically see a slight decline. In this K-12 school serving almost 200 students, the successes don’t end there. The number of high school students being held back a grade dropped in the 2014-15 school year by nearly two-thirds—from 19 down to 7. And, the high school completion rate for secondary classes as well as college-credit bearing courses increased as well through PGA’s concurrent enrollment program with local colleges.

50 Of The Best Podcasts For High School Students -
50 Of The Best Podcasts For High School Students by Dennis Lee, StudyPug.com This post is the first part to a 3-part series entitled “250 things any high school student must learn”.

High school is perhaps one of the biggest turning points of a person’s life. Sure, there’s still college after that, but not everyone gets the chance to move that stage forward. So while you’re all in the stage where you go wonder what you really want to be like in the years to come, why not try listening to Podcasts to give yourself some insights about life. So here’s a collection of 50 Podcasts that any high school student should listen to, categorized into the four general topics would help you focus on what you might choose to become in the years to come. Academic Related Podcasts There are things that we can’t just learn in a four walled classroom, which is why these podcasts could offer you more practical applications of the theories they discuss to you.